Quick Tip: Easily change a specific color in Photoshop

Oct 15th/2010

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Hi friends, on today’s tip we’re going to learn how to easily edit color in Photoshop, but not just editing global tones, making grayscales and things like that, we’re talking about how to adjust the color of a specific area inside a picture without affecting the rest of the image, for example adjusting a shirt color or modifying the color of the hair. This is a very simple tip that will help you a lot when you have a picture where you don’t like the blue shirt that you’re wearing on the family’s portrait and you wish you had wore a red one.

For start you need to find a picture that you want to edit in terms of color, we chose our friend’s Niko photograph because he thought that blue was making him look bad and he asked us to switch it for a red t-shirt.

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Then we go to Photoshop and choose the lasso tool, give it about a 7 px feather to make the changes a little bit smoother.

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Now select the t-shirt area, it doesn’t matter if you choose some skin on the process, it won’t be affected once we complete the changes.

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Now go to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation to start making the color adjustments.

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And now you are seeing the edition panel, the first thing you need to do is change from Master to a color that is definitely not the one that we want to edit, for example, red or yellow.

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Don’t change anything else from the panel, then move your picker above the t-shirt and click over it, you will see how it automatically detects the color.

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And now you only need to experiment with the three main handlers, we suggest you to only play with Hue and Saturation unless you’re confident of what you’re doing, the best way on this case is to reduce the saturation a little bit and then play with the hue.

Usually this tool works better with some colors than with others, it depends primarily on the original color and the quality of the source picture, give it a shot and let us know how it went.

tshirt08